hobby games design

Once game-making reaches a certain scale, the process of game-making becomes front-loaded with the process of convincing someone to pay for the development of your game.

If you play games but don’t make them, you may find this enlightening. I know that when I was younger, and particularly before I chose to make commercial games as my career, I took games for granted. As in, “I want to play a game, so I’ll go buy a game.” It never occurred to me how much decision-making went into the process. And now that I do this for a living, I feel a sense of kinship when I see someone else’s efforts in the process. Post-mortems and development conferences are fascinating, for example.

So here’s a look at the sort of thing I do all day when I’m not engaged in the nuts and bolts of actually making the game: I’m trying to convince someone who has the means — financial, labor, distribution — to make an idea become more than an idea, and begin its metamorphosis from idea to playable experience. (This isn’t a proposal I worked on, but it’s a good template for or inside view of the process.)

This sort of thing is usually hidden behind NDAs and other proprietary screens, but Ninja Theory has published some of its preproduction documentation that shows just how substantial and detailed pitching and pre-production can be.

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I’m holding a drawing for the limited edition version of Anarchs Unbound, the last book I developed for Vampire: The Masquerade. If you’re into autographs, I’ll do that, too. All you have to do to enter the drawing is make a donation to Feeding America and show me your receipt of donation. Doesn’t matter how much it is, and you can of course blur your personal details if you’re nervous about personal information on the web. Also, you can donate from anywhere — I’ll cover the shipping costs regardless of where you live if you’re drawn as the winner.

I’ll do the drawing on September 22 2017, so you have a few weeks to assemble a donation. You can send me proof of your donation via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail jachilli (at) gmail (dot) com.

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Gamemastering is a combination of art and science, and like any skill, is improved by doing more of it. As you run RPG sessions, you’ll pick up your own style, voice, and tricks of the trade. Here a few that I use on occasion when I run games — I hope they serve you well.

The Prophecy is False

The Thing Portended doesn’t come to happen. The magic sword falls into the hands of a rival power, who destroyed the stone rather than yanking the sword from it. The grimoire in the occult library has been defaced rather than imparting its secrets to the foretold sorcerer. There are two — or more — “chosen ones” and a heroic effort becomes factionalized. The benefits of using this technique are that it makes the world feel more governed by actions and consequences rather than faits accompli — which subtly reinforces that the actions of the characters are significant, because free will matters. If the prophecy was magical in nature, a false prophecy indicates either capricious, unreliable magic, or perhaps darker forces at work subverting it. If the Prophecy is technological, it creates doubt in the default assumptions of technology’s omniscience, and can likewise indicate behind-the-scenes efforts to sabotage what is “known.”

Destroy Money

If monetary treasure is part of a campaign’s rewards, players need to have things to spend that money on. If money can’t be used for anything significant, it’s little more than an extrinsic score. If solutions to game problems are available for easy purchase and the players have too much money, the players can effectively handwave away many of the game’s consequences. Adventure campaigns in particular require careful use of the party’s resources, including spells, special abilities, hit points, and the currency used to equip the party. You don’t have to keep track of every nickel and dime, but a scarcity of game resources forces the players to make considered decisions to guarantee their success. Taxes, room and board, homestead expenses and the like all help the players have a sense of ownership in the world. Having the pack mule with their bushel of gemstones fall off the side of a mountain is a less reasonable way to take money away… unless it kicks off a quest to retrieve the lost lucre.

A simple gameplay loop, well suited to monetary rewards, that allows players to demonstrate mastery as well as destroying resources

Use Critical Failures to Speed Resolution

In many cases, critical failures end up prolonging systems interaction, rather than creating interesting outcomes. Critically fail an attack, you drop your sword; critically fail a research roll and you confound your study and have to start over. Consider instead using the critical failure to help speed the resolution, rather than extending it. For example, I use a house rule that gives adacent foes an attack of opportunity if a player (or monsters!) rolls a 1 on the attack roll. Botched research yields incorrect information rather than resetting research task progress to 0.

Rob Peter to Pay Paul

Speaking of critical failures, “bank” them when possible for when you have a chance to make them more significant than a tactical setback. A critical failure on a Repair roll holds the ship together for now — but it’ll give out at some critical moment in the future (necessitating more decision-making and problem-solving). A critical failure to cast a spell invokes a demon somewhere else. Use critical failures to create interesting outcomes and to generate new choices and new opportunities for action. And players will have a delicious dread of a critical failure that seems like a success. Be consistent, though! The “banked” outcome has to relate to the original botch. No fair punishing a player on a Perception roll when they crit-failed an attack roll five encounters ago.

An opportunity for something more exciting than “You drop your pistol.”

Share the Narrative Duties

Rather than using an expository speech, reveal world history in broad strokes. Players like playing. Fewer players like being subjected to a GM lore dump. Give just enough detail to stoke player interest, and then share the worldbuilding with them as it emerges from their reactions to your broad strokes. It can be anything from naming an unnamed village to inventing a local custom in a place the party visits — and it should be happening a lot in your games, whether you try to do it or not. And when you do try to do it, you create that much more engagement and investment.

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Last week, we concluded a campaign of 3+ years. I was the GM, and in the interests of improving my craft, I wrote up the following postmortem on our experiences. Hopefully it’s valuable to you. It’s definitely helped me organize my thoughts on this particular game and group.

An auburn sun glitters off the canals. Lamplighters fill the lanterns over the strada with oil. A boisterous laugh, an overturned jug in a pool of wine. A man bolts across a bridge wearing a devil’s mask. A woman reclines at the fore of a gondola, fanning herself in the humid night air. A scent of gunsmoke and basil. The sound of a harmonium. Lewd graffiti on a fresco above the heads of ruddy-faced, mustachioed paisan, idling away the night with cards and catcalls. A cloaked figure, moving in the shadows of the stuccoed walls. The glint of dying sunlight off a knife’s blade.

Belluna Serenissima! Its tastes and smells inflame the imagination, from the salt tang of the waterway-streets to the rich scent of the grilled polpo to the delicate bouquet of its finest wines. Skilled craftsmen of all trades display their handmade wares in stalls passed down family lines for centuries. Great artists, scientists, and philosophers flock to its wealthy patrons. The al fresco public houses seem forever open. The ports teem with goods and visitors from all across the world.

But Belluna is also a city of contrasts. Its churches give succor to the devout while the palatial estate of its Doge erupts into the all-night revelry of the carnevale. Its Palazzo Ducale stands testament to the might of the city, even as its underprivileged wonder when their next meal will be.It has inherited a tradition of law from its classical forerunners, yet its ill-lit alleyways harbor a motley array of gangsters and racketeers who are invisible to — or above — that selfsame law.

A subalpine port city, Belluna lies at the foot of the mountain passes that travel beneath Monte Bianco to the northwest and the Piave Sea to the east. It is a city of canals, fed by the River Amaro, most of which bustle during the day with commerce and private travel. Many of the city’s roads are earthen, but much travel happens by canali and ponti, particularly near the trade district, where a great deal of the city’s inbound commerce occurs. Many other waterways, though, meander through the city proper, creating a poetic spirit and giving Belluna its unique personality.

This, then, is a chronicle of those who would taste the fruits Belluna has to offer. From the sparkling blue-green waterways to the solemn granite of its cathedrals, from the heights of Monte Bianco’s crags to the depths of the Piave Bay, from the secret tryst offered by a masked temptress to the proclamation of war shouted by the capitan di ventura, from the neutral grounds observed by the warring assassins’ guilds to the lairs of the monstrosities lurking in the city’s long shadows, Belluna is a city of unrelenting adventure!

We played Pathfinder, starting from 2nd level PCs advancing to 8th, using the slow progression scheme.

Pros: What Went Right

We used roll20.net, which offered a number of positives. The virtual tabletop allowed us to overcome the geographical space between all of us (a few Raleigh-Durham locals, a Pennsylvanian, and a Californian). I purchased a number of maps that lent a far greater degree of high-quality art than I would have been able to build or scrawl in black marker on a battlemat, so the environments were very satisfying to look at for hours on end. Macros, hidden rolls, shareable handouts, and the rest of the suite of roll20 features were all golden, and I can’t recommend it enough.

I was fairly stingy with treasure, but this resulted in most characters gaining “signature” magic items that affected how they played. This was a positive result, and not one that would have improved had I simply added more money to the rewards. Characters developed in unique ways built around the magical items they accumulated, making for a high degree of personality.

Player dependency and interrelationship was good, even though most players chose classes outside the trinity. Some weird stuff developed, which was cool. For example, the tank had a pair of boots of striding and springing, and one of the other heavy hitters was a monk, so the group’s front line was very mobile. Lacking a traditional healer in the latter third of the campaign, the party alchemist ended up developing healing bombs, and the paladin, the only other healer, was decidedly less mobile than everyone else (heavy armor!), which made the party cultivate some non-traditional stay-alive tactics.

A few key NPCs emerged as story drivers. A much-hated antagonist caused much consternation as he became an ally. An information-handler found himself in danger, and the PCs rallied to protect him. A wealthy patron had to prove herself due to association with an antagonist. Once I saw players responding to these, I used them more frequently, and always to provide them with decisions (rather than make the decisions for them).

Character mortality was low, in accordance with the rules, and the deaths that did occur carried an emotional weight that reinforced the players’ engagement. I would have liked perhaps one more PC death, but they are tough buggers, and adaptable.

Room for Improvement

As it so often does, real life often intruded, and some sessions had to be rescheduled, canceled, or subbed out for one-shots. This is fine, of course, but playing via virtual tabletop made it very hard to pick up where we had left off. Sessions ran approximately monthly, and while everyone was excited to play, we definitely lost some brain cycles to “Okay, remind me what happened last time again?” or even “Who is this guy we supposedly met six sessions ago?” It’s unfair for a GM to expect players to spend as many mental cycles on the campaign as they do (since they’re doing much more of the organizational work), but this occasionally undermined some of the engagement/ investment in key scenes or even raised the question “Why are we doing this?” when the immediate answer should have been one of volition.

Infrequent game sessions made it particularly hard to enforce delayed effects and disease attacks (filth fever, lycanthropy, etc.). A general assumption that everyone “returned to town” between sessions generally had game time elapse between one session and the next, meaning that even if the effects took place, they would have abated by the time the next session convened. Players enjoyed the benefit of facing foes that had these attacks (increased XP rewards, etc.) while having to endure little of the drawbacks. Next time I want to plan better to incorporate the session downtimes and/ or construct plot events so that these become more of a factor, as opposed to handwaving them away. Construction of sessions to more serial than episodic would bring these lingering effect more into the spotlight.

Infrequent sessions saw us handwaving away much of the travel as PC levels increased. This very much disappoints me, as the interstitial journeys that take place in an RPG are where so many of the world details emerge and where the players test out tactics (or decide that avoiding a challenge is better than facing it). We lost out on a lot of roleplay by skipping the getting-there.

“Main events” consumed more and more time in tandem with the players’ and antagonists’ special ability portfolios. The “connective tissue” of the campaign scaled back and back because the focal conflicts of the evening session became more and more demanding, in terms of construction and game mastering.

I would have preferred more substantial journaling and quest logging, but the players mostly weren’t into it. Every now and then, the logging effort surged, but most players non-participation in it — and my frequent lack of input — I think resulted in the players who were keeping up with it losing interest. I’m not normally one to offer extrinsic rewards or bribes for keeping up with this stuff, since that often turns the results into something perfunctory, but I do have some sense of loss over a more consistent chronicle of the campaign. This is something I should make time for in the future, and encourage more in the players. I don’t want to do it myself because a) that offers too much of a “peek behind the curtain” that’s supposed to emerge at the table, and b) it’s a way for players to remain engaged and “play when they’re not playing” if they’re so inclined. But they weren’t, so I’m other looking for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, or I need to demonstrate more of a value to it.

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When you’re running* a game, avoid making a player lose a turn. Game design doesn’t have many universal truisms, but this is one.

Players play games to fulfill needs. And when you prevent a player from taking an action, you’re literally preventing that player from having any ability to satisfy those needs. Paralysis, fear effects, stunning, etc. are all conditions that sound cool or thematic, but actually undermine the reason people play games to begin with: to see the outcomes of their actions, to improve at the actions in play, to relate to one another, and to exercise choice.

Lio by Mark Tatulli

Instead, consider the following when you intend to create tension or anxiety by restricting a player’s ability to act:

Consume a resource to perform an action (which at least allows the player to decide whether acting is worth spending that resource)

Take actions at increased resource costs

Act at reduced efficiency or effectiveness (e.g. move or attack but not both, attack at a damage penalty, heal using a die one step down from the standard die, draw one fewer action card, etc.)

Act as normal with the input of another player (e.g. The cleric demands the player “Snap out of it!” which allows players to decide upon their own criteria for allowing each other to exchange a less effective action for a greater one)

If you’re not letting a player play, why are they at the table?

Note that, in most cases, it’s perfectly acceptable for a player to deprive a GM character of an action. The GM is often in the position of taking actions for multiple entities, and the nature of the GM’s participation is different from the way the player interacts with the game. Indeed, games that rely on creating strong tactical advantage (D&D 4e, Pathfinder, etc.) can actually benefit from depriving GM entities of their actions, as it streamlines play and hastens decision-making back into the players’ hands.

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“Getting into the dungeon” is usually a straightforward affair, and one without a huge amount of significance. It’s often glossed over; on occasion it’s used as a change to spring a tone-setting trap on unwary players or to deliver an ominous expositional portent. Moving through a dungeon is often similarly linear, offering a few more choices, but modern design by and large drives players through a series of escalating challenges to an ultimate “boss fight” or consummating set-piece conflict.

Movement into and through contained physical spaces can be so much more than this, however. One of my favorite classic modules, Caverns of Thracia, provided numerous avenues of approach from the surface into the dungeon environment itself, as well as from within it to the lower levels. The eponymous Castle Ravenloft consists of a variety of branching hallways and catacombs. In general, when you branch the movement opportunities of a physical space, the emphasis of the game session becomes one of volitional exploration over overt conquest. Finding how and why to move where takes precedence over how to overcome what. (Which isn’t to suggest removing fights or other encounters, it just shifts the emphasis.)

Constructing location-based adventures with multiple choices and multiple points of ingress offers a host of satisfying decisions to players, and are equally as fulfilling to GM while watching the deliberations ensue.

Players can pursue an immediate short-term goal of discovering all the points of entry to the location

Players can choose their approach to the environment so as to best suit the party composition and strategy

Players can “shortcut” to deeper levels when they’re ready to undertake those challenges without retreading already cleared ares — unless a clever GM wants to repopulate the cleared areas to offer additional challenges and rewards

As you can see this provides a wealth of significant decisions for the players to make during gameplay, and it provides them numerous opportunities for action. Stuff like this is why people play games to begin with as opposed to consuming more sttaic media: to see the outcomes of what they do.

Practical Application

Dungeons in fantasy games are the most immediately obvious example.

The original Succubus Club for Vampire was set up with an “open floor plan” that allowed players to move through it and claim micro-territory in this most prestigious of Kindred hangouts, and even included a basement “labyrinth” for clubgoers who deliberately wanted to lose themselves in its environs.

Bars, dance floors, VIP booths, cocktail tables, the DJ booth, the coatroom, etc. can all be locations in a modern “dungeon,” with numerous ways to approach them.

Multiple choices can also capitalize on the themes of fear present in horror games, whether being lost in the caverns where a cult of Deep Ones worships in Call of Cthulhu or searching for your beloved in the mall’s service tunnels and boiler rooms in Monsterhearts.

Games like Spycraft, Night’s Black Agents, and Leverage can have “dungeon crawls” through environments like corporate skyscrapers, fallout shelters, derelict churches, apartment high-rises, and warehouse complexes.

Mazy spacecraft, military outposts, and planetary strongholds can translate the experience into games like Star Wars, Stars Without Number, and Starfinder.

And of course, post-holocaust games can adapt any of these locations and more, whether as leftovers from collapsed civilizations to new constructions erected by dangerous mutants or reavers.

While Designing…

The following techniques can help you design game spaces that offer a great deal of autonomy.

Make use of vertical space: Level one can have a staircase that goes down to level two, a sinkhole that connects level one to level two from a different room, an airshaft that leads directly to level four, and an elevator that stops at all levels. Giving players options for not only their route but their destination affords them the opportunity to challenge themselves and set their own goals. Used wisely, you will get a lot of mileage out of this design principle. In computer games, level design is a entire discipline, making extensive use of this technique. (And it’s no coincidence that Caverns of Thracia‘s original author, Jennell Jacquays, is an accomplished level designer for computer games.)

A cross-section of vertical space arrangement in Swords & Wizardry

Favor authenticity over realism: You can enter and exit the monster’s pit by being dropped through the trap door in the throne room floor… but also through the tight, twisty tunnels the vermin in the kitchen have burrowed. Who cares if the vermin don’t actually burrow and that it doesn’t make sense that the kitchen is next to the monster pit? What’s important are the choices and the thematic consistency, and to suggest that someone else down there has an interest in smuggling food to the pit monster….

Staged complexity: Not everything has to be available to the players immediately. Oftentimes, players will enjoy a chance to revisit a known, “mastered” portion of the location that poses new challenges. Over the course of the players’ exploration of the site, open additional options to them. Pulling a lever on level three opens an additional entrance to an unexplored section of level one. A room on the surface that’s initially inaccessible can be unlocked with the password offered by an NPC encountered in a lower level. An entire floor can rotate, changing the layout of a “known” location and granting access to previously unknown areas. With weird magic or superscience, entire portions may even vanish or be revealed “when the stars are right” or other criteria are satisfied. Thus the additional options open to players once they’ve already been introduced to the location, so they’re not overwhelmed by it.

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Blog necromancy! This entry is a few years old (cross-posted here from an older blog), but remains valid in terms of design philosophy.

In game design, “too powerful” is a misleading phrase. The actual design should reflect “It needs to cost more.” A power or effect should remain pretty true to its original design. Mind control needs to feel like mind control — you can’t take a little bit away from it and hope to elicit the same in-game effect or the same player enthusiasm. A lightning blast needs to be a levinbolt that electrocutes its target, not a wee spark that sizzles foes for a li’l bit of damage. Hyper-speed needs to be fast… no, faster than that. David Bowie’s cone of frost breath weapon needs to crystallize targets caught in the blast radius.This isn’t to say that there’s no place for low-powered effects. Those certainly have their place, particularly in level-based systems* that gradually step up the potency of what players can do. In these cases, the price is still important, and they still need to be relative to the effect, so it stands to reason that the costs should be commensurately lower.

One of the design philosophies that resonates with me is that all special effects should feel overpowered. As the player, I’m the coolest thing in the game, so everything taking place in the game should reward me for being there. When I do something — particularly something that my character has as an edge, such as a superpower, special skill, or supernatural ability — I should say “WOW!” when I use it. This engages me and empowers me. This is one of my rewards for spending time with the game. This can be a visual effect in a video game, a chance to spend a unique resource in a board game, an effect only my character type can create in a tabletop RPG, or the ability to use a special type of card in a card game.

My choice in choosing a play style contributes a lot to this. If I’m a psychic spy, my WOW! moment might be using my psychic powers to command or confuse my enemies. If I’m a wizard, it could be an icy blast that freezes my enemies, causing them damage and immobilizing them. A fighter type can stun an opponent with a rabbit punch or disembowel him with a dagger.

The fact that it feels overpowered doesn’t mean it should be overpowered, though, and that’s where the cost to create effects comes in. A particle effect and some audio feedback in a video game can provide that overpowered-feeling WOW! for even an average effect. Rockets and missiles in EVE, for example, land with a resounding explosion that feels very satisfying. They don’t do inordinate amounts of damage, but they feel exciting when they hit. Every character class in D&D 4e has nifty “at-will” powers that feel unique and exciting, even though they really amount to little more than a basic attack with a minor bell or whistle attached. The Disciplines in Vampire make the Kindred a cut above mortals, and since there are way more mortals in the world than there are vampires, Disciplines are both rare and empowering. The prices to invoke all of these effects, whether it’s ISK-per-missile, blood points, or frequency, keeps everyone important — players — on the same playing field.

That’s the challenge — creating the feeling of awesome while still preserving the integrity of play through managing the cost of effects in resources.

* (Now, one of the perils of level-based systems is that the mathematical challenge increases in sync with the ability of the character, so that things often don’t really become more difficult, the numbers behind them simply become greater. In many of these cases, the character’s frequency of success remains about the same — he’s trying to reach a higher threshold, but his bonus modifiers to get there are higher.)

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When you take it upon yourself to GM a horror game, it’s your job to build a moody experience. If you’ve run a game as a GM before, you know that building mood is a significant task! You share the storytelling stage with the players, and by and large, they react to the game elements you’ve told them are present. With that in mind, knowing how and what you want to present the players with goes a long way toward maintaining the mood appropriate to a horror session or campaign. The following suggestions aim to help you do that.

Create Fear, Don’t Squick

Fear is an emotion that comes as a result of the uncertainty of one’s own well being. Characters in a horror game are right to feel fear — some dark force has turned its baleful eye directly upon them!

Every good GM knows to add sensory detail to their descriptions, the better to immerse the players in the setting. Gory detail should be used sparingly, however. Gory detail more often creates revulsion, not fear, and risks replacing the thrill of fear with discomfort. Resist the urge to devote too much attention to the glisten of viscera or what’s dripping from a ghoul’s mouth. While certain parties may appreciate this sort of thing (and, of course, you know your gaming group better than anyone who’s never met them could), be wary of risking their enjoyment of the game by placing too much emphasis on splatter in place of building a mounting mood of horror.

Detail is like a spice. Too much overwhelms the dish. A little goes a long way.

Let Imagination Loom

Fear thrives in environments where the mind is left to imagine its ultimate doom. The monster unseen is more fearsome than the monster described. The creaking door, the guttering candle, the faraway howl on the moor: All of these create more fear than revealing what caused them. Ultimately, many questions will be answered and many mysteries will be revealed over the course of a session or campaign, but leaving some time between describing some element of the story and revealing its true nature is the crucible in which horror forms.

This technique works well for everything from small details on up to greater campaign mysteries. Revealing partial information to the players sets their minds to imagining all sorts of worst-case scenarios that help reinforce the mood at the table. Pacing the rate at which you reveal information can trade much on that principle. Introducing strange and incomplete details and allowing the players to ascribe dreadful significance to them lets the players brood upon the unknown. It’s a technique used in mystery stories as well, but it takes on a fearsome gravity when matched with other elements of horror.

Example Details

Minor details: The creaking door, the guttering candle, the faraway howl on the moor, as mentioned above. Footsteps on the ground floor of the inn (who could be visiting at this time of night?)

Story details: A bloody knife discovered in the refectory. Flashes of light witnessed at the castle on the crag from the village below. The missing servants at the tycoon’s mansion.

Campaign details: The construction of the new crypt on the family estate (because the old crypt filled so quickly…). Learning that the librarian is the seventh son of a seventh son. The brewery is owned by the son of the secret police, and every delivery has an extra barrel unaccounted for on the shipping manifest.

Discovery Through Repetition

Delivering game descriptions with emphatic repetition indicates to players that the repeated detail is important. The repetition reinforces the presence and normalcy of the detail. It creates a pattern that stands out when it’s broken (which allows you to amplify the dread by the players not knowing what has caused the break in the pattern). It creates a subtle signal that makes players feel empowered when they discover.

The chilly castle has a fire stoked in every room that feebly keeps the cold at bay. The perfect array of bricks in the Boston cellar walls indicates attentive craftsmanship. Every envoy sent by the ambassador has blond hair. When the players explore one of the castle rooms with only smoking embers in the fireplace (who or what put it out?), observes a cellar wall with a single missing brick (what’s behind it?), or receives an envoy from the ambassador who is strikingly bald (why is this fellow different?), their minds work to analyze the the change in the pattern. And this lets their imagination loom, as above.

Steal Their Ideas

A clever GM knows when to rely on the purchased or pre-annotated source material, and when to run with the players’ cues. Packaged stories are commercial products, and are generally written to entertain the broadest audiences. Notes written by the GM before the session starts are, at best, projections of concepts that will challenge and entertain the players. But when your session is underway, you’re getting live, real-time feedback for the game events that you can use immediately so that you can tailor further developments to that player response. If your notes say the Duke is secretly the werewolf, but your players have a more significant connection to the midwife, maybe it’s best to change the werewolf’s identity. If the vital clue is in the publisher’s office but the players are having more fun at the mayor’s inaugural ball, consider relocating the vital clue to city hall.

Be careful with this! Ultimately horror revolves around the perception of helplessness. But if players feel that every time they develop an attachment to a character or show an interest in a setting element, the GM turns it against them, they will feel punished for their engagement. Horror relies on hope to contrast the darkness with light, and a sense of accomplishment is critical to maintain even in a horror environment.

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Class-based game systems are occasionally described as offering “niche protection” as part of their design. The cleric is a healer, and no one else heals as well as the cleric, for example. The rogue excels at dealing damage; the fighter withstands punishment like no other. The wizard controls the crowd and/ or damages wide areas. Each of these roles has a thing it does well, so the “niche protection” statement is true.

But, in a larger design sense, what niche protection actually offers is an ecology of dependencies that build relatedness between players. A party of four fighters won’t fare as well as a more rounded party, because many of the things fighters depend on aren’t offered by other fighters. (Of course, some systems offer ways to vary the makeup of various classes, but these variants are rarely as potent in their variant role as the core class structured to meet the dependency.) The cleric’s job is to keep everyone standing, something that no other class does as well; the other players depend on the cleric for this, accordingly. The fighter’s job is to keep threats focused on him; the other classes depend on the fighter taking the most heat so they can perform their functions. The rogue is augmented by sneak attack damage, so she eliminates threats quickly, but she relies on the cleric to keep her standing and the fighter to keep enemy attention on him.

Designing for these dependencies not only helps the player group maximize its effectiveness, but also helps strengthen the relationships between players. And since games are a social endeavor first and foremost, rewarding those relationships is ultimately a proven method of keeping the players engaged for the long term.

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One way to allow greater player agency is to construct a “hub” from which core campaign elements radiate, making for a number of possible action points that are accessible from it. For example, if we assume that the PCs’ starting town is the hub, a storied dungeon, a cavern complex, and an abandoned mountain keep might all be proximate to that starting town. If the starting hub is a space station, a smugglers’ lair may be nearby, along with an asteroid belt where aggressive aliens hide and a dangerous anomaly from a precursor culture.

The opportunities for action radiating from the hub need not be physical locations, they can just as viably be non-location-based encounters or entities. For example, a vampire coterie’s domain may be immediately affected by rumors of Anarch turbulence, the appearance of fragments of the Book of Nod, and a sudden shift in nightlife that relocates the Rack.

Having a number of actionable choices radiating from the central hub serves both the players and the GM. For the GM, a number of options allows them to control the scope of their preparation. Without having to detail a full sandbox, a smaller number of encounter contingencies is more easily managed. For the players, a number of options allows them the volition to choose the course of action that most interests them, but doesn’t subject them to a decision-halting paradox of choice.

Importantly, decision hubs can scale to whatever challenge level at which the campaign takes place. This is especially valuable for starting or low-level campaigns, which can easily lead the players into feeling railroaded if they don’t feel that they’re making significant decisions.